


Silence My Demons

by Blue_Savannah



Category: Daughter of Smoke and Bone - Laini Taylor, Star Wars Sequel Trilogy
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-02-02
Updated: 2020-03-27
Packaged: 2021-02-27 18:42:40
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 6,845
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22520419
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Blue_Savannah/pseuds/Blue_Savannah
Summary: A very loose retelling of Laini Taylor's incredibleDaughter of Smoke and Boneseries, with Star Wars characters, set in the modern world.Rey’s very first memories are of flight, of a huge, open sky, and a home made in cliff-side caves that came alive with windsong – but though she’s Googled all the various places she’s lived, not one of them houses caves to match her mysterious memories. And that doesn’t even begin to account for the strange recollection of flight, or the weird hamsas tattooed on her palms, or any of the other thousand inexplicable facts about herself that she’s never been able to reconcile.About herself, she knows only that her name is Rey, and that she was raised by a family of monsters who deal in wishes.
Relationships: Armitage Hux/Rey, Kylo Ren/Rey, Rey/Ben Solo | Kylo Ren
Comments: 4
Kudos: 8





	1. Chapter 1

Rey wakes up to an animal musk, the sharp snarl of teeth, and … slobber. 

“Luke?” she croaks unsteadily. Belatedly, she realizes by the dampness on her pillow that the slobber is actually drool, and it is her own. Wiping her mouth with all the grace of an ungainly toddler, she lurches to an upright position in the cot, her heart hammering with the remnants of the nightmare. _A blade, bright as moonlight, cleaving her in half._ She’d felt the awful finality of the moment as a stone in her stomach pulling her downwards, and when she’d looked up at the sharp scythe above her, she’d heard … wings. No distant beats to herald an oncoming flock of birds, these wings were human-sized, big enough to stir up great storms of air – and they were headed straight for her, at furiously fast speed.

She’d woken up in a tangle of bedsheets to see Luke peering down at her. His eyes were those of a crocodile, colored a lustrous gold stabbed through with vertical slit pupils. For just a moment, before her sleep-addled mind registered who he was, she’d felt a pulse of fear. 

Anyone looking at Luke would think him a monster. Rey knows how the public would react, should he ever stray from the safety of the shop. His frightening visage would be enough to incite riots and send the superstitious to their knees, mouthing prayers. People would call him a monster, a demon, a devil – or worse.

But Luke isn’t a monster. He is chimaera.

Luke’s arms and torso are the only human aspects of him, and they are criss-crossed with horrific scars, the web of half-healed skin alluding to a timeline of abuse about which Rey has never even dared ask. Below the waist, Luke’s body morphs into that of a lion. His haunches are covered in dirty golden fur, rippled with muscle and age, but instead of the paws of a lion, his feet taper to wicked claws. His head is that of a ram’s, fleshed in tough, brown hide, and framed on both sides by a spiral of yellow horns. He wears no ornamentation, save for a set of jeweler’s lenses on a chain, and an old wishbone, resting on a piece of twine in the hollow of his throat. 

He is monstrous. Majestic. He is also the only father Rey has ever known.

“Luke,” Rey repeats, her voice unsteady. The dream has unsettled her; tearing herself free of it felt like plunging headlong off a precipice. Now she is dizzy with the landing. “You scared me.”

Luke regards her unblinkingly, his eerie reptilian eyes set in the darkness of his face like bright jewels. “You were talking in your sleep.”

A prickle of unease grips her. _The dream._ It had felt ominous, weighted, a harbinger of death. Even now the taste of it lingers in her mouth, stale like last night’s dinner. “What was I saying?”

Luke only continues to watch her. The silence stretches uncomfortably. “Well?”

“Well, what?”

Rey crosses her arms. “What did I say?”

Luke scratches one of his horns with a jagged fingernail. “I’d prefer not to answer that question.”

Rey huffs a frustrated sigh. Withholding information is one of the many hallmarks to make up Luke’s charming personality. How many times has she asked him essential questions, only to be shot down by that blank, reptilian stare? Rey’s very first memories are of flight, of a huge, open sky, and a home made in cliff-side caves that came alive with windsong – but though she’s Googled all the various places she’s lived, not one of them houses caves to match her mysterious memories. And that doesn’t even begin to account for the strange recollection of flight, or the weird hamsas tattooed on her palms, or any of the other thousand inexplicable facts about herself that she’s never been able to reconcile. 

About herself, she knows only that her name is Rey, and that she was raised by a family of monsters who deal in wishes.

Actually, the wishes are primarily Luke’s domain, and people come from all over the world to buy them. In Rey’s experience, a wish isn’t granted by a shooting star, or a witch disguised as a crone, or a genie freed from a lap. The only place to purchase one is from Luke’s magic shop, which exists at the center of everywhere and nowhere, depending on how you look at it. 

There is only one way to buy a wish. As with fairytales, wishes are expensive, burdensome things – but unlike stories, they don’t cost firstborn children, or kingdoms or birth rights.

No, wishes cost _teeth._

Those that come for Luke’s wishes come armed with pouches of teeth, plundered from animals and humans, and sometimes, the dead. That makes them either thieves, murderers or desperate – and desperate buyers are the worst kind of all, because they come willing to commit the horrific self-mutilation required to earn a bruxis, the most powerful wish on earth.

Such power is an imbalance to the universe, and demands a great sacrifice in response. The only way to pay for a bruxis is with one’s own teeth. Every single one of them, and all self-extracted.

Rey has seen this done only twice. Five years ago, an old woman fainted in Luke’s shop, a pair of bloody pliers still embedded in the soft palate of her mouth. She lost her nerve before she could yank out the molars.

Then there was Phasma, a trader from South Dakota, who specialized in large animal pelts. One of Luke’s regulars, Phasma often arrived swaddled in fur and leather, bearing feline canines by the jarful. Rey disliked her on the basis of animal cruelty, and for a thousand other small reasons that ranged from her rank smell to her perpetually bloodied hands, but this all paled in comparison to the day Phasma stalked in, carrying a full set of human teeth, freshly removed. _Her_ teeth. She’d slammed them on the table with gusto, baring her mouthful of weeping gums like she was proud of what she’d done.

Luke wasn’t in the habit of asking what people wished for – in the same way a bartender wouldn’t ask what you did when drunk, because the answer is rarely good – but Rey knows instinctively that Phasma’s wish culminated in death and destruction.

Rey feels a darkness attached itself to her that day, and it is a shadow she carries with her by being continually complicit in Luke’s gruesome activities. In reality, she wants no part of secrets, or teeth or self-mutilation. Yet, at least once a month, Luke calls upon Rey to run errands for him. Mostly, these involve meeting and trading with Luke’s connections around the world to acquire more teeth. But lately, the errand asks have have grown increasingly frequent, and the nature of these tasks darker. 

Five months ago, Rey traveled via portal to Argentina, where a particularly loathsome trader had attempted to sell her a sack of teeth pilfered almost entirely from _la Recoleta,_ the cemetery that houses the country’s wealthiest and most famous corpses. Standing in a pool of relentlessly bright South American sunshine, fingering a fistful of dirty incisors, she’d felt the sweat gather on her neck from more than just heat. Luke had trained Rey in the business of teeth since infancy, and the special vibrations of these teeth whispered to her of rot and putrid earth. Rey didn’t know what Luke used the teeth for, but she did know what he looked for in his investments: strength, quality and durability. These teeth were decrepit, worn down by age and pain, and of no real value to her.

“These are worthless,” she’d told the trader flatly, her Spanish (acquired via wish) matching his natural-born language perfectly.

“I went to great personal trouble to retrieve them,” he responded, eyes narrowing. Rey imagined him rummaging through the mausoleums by moonlight, tossing aside mementos left by mourners as he pried his prize from the mouths of the dead. Her stomach twisted with revulsion.

When the trader realized she wasn’t changing her mind, he’d whipped out a pistol and shot her. Twice. In the stomach, at point blank range. Rey had razed the last of her emergency stash of wishes to escape home; even so, it took her a month to heal – and that was with the help of magic.

When she’d whimpered to Luke that he clearly didn’t care what happened to her, he’d merely fastened her with his luminous crocodile eyes and said, “Of course I care.”

“You have a funny way of showing it then, sending me off to God Knows Where to trade with God Knows Who.”

“Your body,” he’d told her, “is just an envelope. Your soul is what I truly care about, and as far as I know, it’s in no immediate danger.”

She hadn’t liked hearing her body referred to as an envelope, as something others could rifle through and open at will, but his words triggered something meaningful in the recesses of her mind. That something flashed once and then disappeared, slippery as the underside of a fish. She couldn’t remember. Fuck. Why couldn’t she remember?

Now, she regards Luke, untouchable as always, securely wrapped in a blanket of secrets and wishes. “Whatever,” she scoffs, knowing better than to push him on something he doesn’t want to reveal. “I assumed you woke me for an errand.”

The brow of his ram’s forehead creases. “Not today. I thought you could use a little hiatus.”

“A … hiatus?”

His face softens imperceptibly. “Leia told me. About you and Hux.”

“Oh.” Rey doesn’t know what else to say. Of course, she’d told Leia, whom she thought of fondly as her chimaera mother, about her breakup with Armitage Hux. She hasn’t thought to bother Luke with something as trivial as her feelings. Teeth are no great matter of the cosmos, and yet, Luke approaches his work doing whatever he does with a severity that suggests he is somehow contributing to a Great Cause. Though, he is currently ignoring the dwindling supply of teeth to ask about her feelings. 

“I’m alright,” Rey responds, touched by his concern. It isn’t strictly true – she doesn’t really know what _alright_ looks like, only that she’s not quite there yet.

Luke blinks once, a slow closing of one lidded eyeball. “He wasn’t worth you, you know.”

“Sure.” 

It’s what everybody says to everybody after a breakup. _He/she wasn’t good enough for you. You deserve more. You’ll find someone better._ But Rey feels the loss of Hux as an unfurling of the weird, hollow core within herself. Being with him had done something to keep the loneliness at bay, though not assuage it completely. She worries no one will ever be able to do that – and isn’t that unhealthy? 

Sometimes, Rey fears the emptiness within her as though it will expand, and cancel her out. Even before Hux’s betrayal, there’d been moments when they were slow dancing or kissing or holding hands in Chelsea Market, and the overwhelming urge had come to Rey that this was all wrong. That she should be doing something different, with someone else. _But what? And with whom?_

Rey feels a profound sensation of incompletion, of something lost. Her memories sing to her of mountain caves, of flight, of a sky so many fathoms bright, the blue sears her eyes. At night, that same sky turns silver, crowned with two moons. Except these aren't really her memories, and she’s never seen two moons here on earth before. 

Unbidden, the dream stirs once more in her subconscious. She remembers the shining blade as it fell to her neck – and with the memory, comes a rush of fear as blinding as it is fleeting. 

_Who is she? Why does she have memories of a life she’s never lived?_ Every time she presses Luke for answers, he responds simply, enigmatically, _infuriatingly,_ “you are my daughter.”

Rey forces a laugh. “I guess I could always wish myself a handsome prince, right?”

Luke doesn’t fall for her thin grasp at lightheartedness. “Some things are better than wishes.”

“Like what?” Rey recognizes the bitterness in her own voice, but finds she can’t help herself. “What power on earth could possibly match a bruxis?”

“Oh,” Luke waves an impatient hand. “All wishes have their limits. Have I taught you nothing, child?”

She is suitably chastened. Luke might be a master of wishes, and of a magic shop that exists at the axis of the world, but he’s taken great care to teach her what true magic is. 

_Love. Hope._ These things come from within. Compared to the chimaera, humans might be small and powerless, but they’re still capable of creating their own magic.

\-------

It’s early morning when Rey departs Luke’s shop for the New School, where she’s majoring in art, media and technology. As always, the sting of magic is slow to leave her in the real world. The leftover residue of it builds behind her eyes, culminating in a blinding headache that has also developed an immunity to ibuprofen. Fucking _fantastic._

It’s mid January, bitterly cold, frost crisping the edges of the pavement. Post Christmas festivities, Manhattan in winter is desolate. Rey’s lived here for two years, after Luke uprooted the shop from Prague, and Indonesia before that. She misses the idyllic snows, the gothic architecture and fairytale turrets of Europe. New York City is mostly slush and cigarette butts and cab drivers trying to run her over – but of course, how could she possibly rebut the hordes of people calling it the pinnacle of civilization, because _where else can you score a bagel at 4AM?_

Well. She’d frequented A Maze in Tchaiovna closer to midnight than 4AM, but it had been her favorite late-night spot in Prague to snag a warm bagel and herbal tea. Thinking of it now, along with the soaring cathedrals and bridges across the winding silver Vltava River, with their throngs of street musicians, ushers in a pang of … not _homesickness_ exactly, but a deepening of the lost feeling at the center of her chest.

Something rattles near her foot. Startled, Rey glances down to see a pigeon pecking, disheartened, at a discarded condom and empty beer bottle. _Nature._

She sighs internally, taking a left to cut through Union Square.

By far, the best thing about New York City is her art classes. Not only does she love drawing, and learning about drawing, but Rey is equal parts fascinated and inspired by her eclectic classmates, many of whom DJ on weekends or travel across the city photographing musicians at intimate concert venues. Rey dreams wistfully about time, and about living a life that isn’t dominated by secrets and teeth and monsters. What would she do? Where would she go?

Leia was the one who’d started her drawing. When Rey was too little to have a life outside the shop, Leia had crouched beside her in the vestibule as Luke met with customers from the other door, the one she was never supposed to open. In the hours they waited, hidden there, Leia produced bits of paper and chalk, and Rey drew first as a means of escape – then, later, as a communication tool.

For her classmates at school, she drew the chimaera: Luke, patiently stringing his necklaces of teeth, his crocodile eyes glowing by lamplight. Leia, more delicate than her brother, with her angel face and her hooded snake neck.

For Luke and Leia, she drew the world outside the shop: delivery boys on bicycles, swaddled in thick layers as they peddled madly around corners. She drew drunk stragglers waiting for trains downtown at 3AM, the city skyline at sunrise, the constellated ceiling of Grand Central Terminal, groups of college students brunching in Chinatown, or bundled up and leaning against the faded exterior of Nom Wah Tea parlor while they waited for dim sum, and …Hux. He’d been the star of her most recent series of sketchbooks. 

In fact, that was how she’d first caught his attention. Rey was in the habit of people watching, hopelessly hooked by anything out of the ordinary, especially drawn to misfits and loners: girls in bars wearing too much makeup and awkwardly fitting outfits, guys in patchwork jackets with shadowed eyes, reading on secluded benches in Washington Square Park. Mostly, she succeeded in drawing her subjects with them none the wiser, but Hux was the kind of man vividly aware of his own appeal. Even in the dingy recesses of B Side, he’d noticed her quick up and down glances. After a few minutes, he was sauntering over to talk to her. He’d been delighted by her rendering, asking if he could keep it, and then keeping his fingers interlaced with hers as he drew her over to the other side of the bar.

Their relationship had begun that way – with her admiring his charisma and handsome face, and him basking in the glow of her adoration – and it had lasted that way all through its duration. 

Thinking of what she’d given him, of how he’d hurt her, makes Rey clench her nails into her palms, leaving behind little half moon divets in her skin. It had been her first real relationship. She’d wanted to be loved badly enough that she put up with the yawning gaps in text conversation, his constant dismissal of her feelings, the insincerity behind his smile, the nights he’d promised to come home and never had – and still she’d been blindsided when he …

When _she …_

When _that girl ..._

Rey stops midstride, accidentally tripping the leggy teenager behind her. She takes a deep, shuddering breath, just like she’s been reading about in the self-help books that really only serve to make her feel even more alien, and pushes the hot ball of emotion down inside herself. Further. Deeper. Until she’s so cold, she can’t feel anything anymore, not even the scream of the winter wind on her cheeks.

She’d been stupid, yes. Blind, sure. Naive, absolutely. But she’d also been lonely – and the loneliness far superseded Hux’s company. It is an ache that not even Luke and Leia can fill, and the chimaera siblings are the only family she’s ever known. 

Rey’s loneliness extends so deeply, it feels like a default, with all other emotions merely acting as masks to cover it up. It feels like something in her wiring has gone wrong, and has been wrong since birth. The worst part is she doesn’t know what. As a human girl, raised by chimaera, she’s well aware of the very obvious gaps in her life story, but she also doesn’t want to alienate her family with too many questions.

Lately though, it feels like even the spiderweb-thin veneer of normalcy is eroding. Rey desperately wants to know who she is … if she ever had a human family, and why they didn’t want her. She wants to know…

Lost in thought, she doesn’t realize that muscle memory has carried her all the way to school until she’s actually standing outside the doors. Pedestrian traffic flows all around her, the sidewalk spilling forth morning commuters glued to their phones and teenagers en route to school, scowling as they sidestep her. When she raises her eyes, Rey can see a similar flow of people traveling up the faceted concrete staircases within the building, visible via huge, diagonal windows. Steadily rising sunshine catches the zigzagging pattern of glass-fiber-reinforced concrete panels, refracting it back into her eyes. Squinting slightly, Rey pulls open the door.

Once inside, she dethaws with a cup of coffee from the cafeteria, then throws her backpack to the ground, in search of her latest comic book. Still in early ideation stages, the pages are loose leaf and messily corralled into a binder. As with her sketchbooks, Rey has been drawing graphic novels since she was little. She’s dubbed the star of the series “Karou” – a name which means hope in her native tongue, the language of the chimaera – and the blue-haired, quick-tongued heroine is everything Rey wishes she could be. Brave, fiery Karou is just as good with a tiny, half moon blade as she is with a full size soldier’s sword, and she is relentless in the fight against evil. Student by day, she spends her nights thwarting the evil angels who plot against her beloved city. 

A girl brushes by her, wearing electric blue lace-up boots, black leather pants and a low-cut iridescent top that flickers bizarrely under the fluorescent lights, immediately igniting Rey’s artistic curiosity. Her pencil moves automatically across a corner of her paper, documenting the sway of the girl’s long, dip-dyed blonde hair against her eye-catching outfit. For fun, she adds a constellation of delicate tattoos spiraling down her shoulders, and she’s just shading in the girl’s expression – focused, distant – when a hand comes down on her shoulder. 

“Rey.” Hux is standing behind her, a lock of auburn hair falling across his forehead, his clear blue eyes shadowed.

Karou jerks upright. She’s so nervous she accidentally swallows her own spit, willing her heart to slow its crazy arrhythmic beat. “What the fuck are you doing here?”

“I wanted to see you.” He smiles the same smile that always used to work on her, drawing her to him like a compulsion. Once, she would have come willingly, wrapped her hand around his waist and laid her head on his shoulder. Once, she would have risen on her tip-toes to kiss him, snaking her tongue languorously around his, losing herself in the warmth of his lips.

Yeah. _Once._ Rey doesn’t even recognize that girl anymore.

She snaps her sketchbook closed. “You realize this is the definition of stalking, right?”

“Stalking?” Hux holds up both hands in supplication. “I came to wish my favorite girl good luck today. Don’t you have that thing this morning? You’re presenting the latest installation of your comic book series.”

At her look of momentary confusion, his smug smile deepens. “See? I remember the important things about you.”

His words stoke the ember of fury in her chest, and she seizes on it, because anger is better than sadness, because anger makes her _strong._ “You don’t know anything about me at all. Leave me alone.”

When she moves to go, he catches her shoulder, holding her in place. “Rey,” his voice turns wheedling. “I said I was sorry. What else do you want from me?”

Rey whirls around. “I thought I made myself clear. I don’t want to be with you anymore.”

“Jesus.” He’s incoherent, unable to grasp that anyone could refuse him. Hux is handsome, but more than that, he radiates charisma. An actor and a model, he craves the glare of the spotlight. Rey had always felt flattered that he chose her, a nobody who’d never belonged to anyone but monsters. She’d felt like life was different when lived out at his side. When the world accepted you, everything felt bigger, and brighter and easier. Turns out, Hux’s acceptance had been fleeting, just like the world’s.

“Rey, please. I’m _sorry_ , OK!”

Last week, Rey was sitting cross legged on the floor of Luke’s shop, lazily sketching his movements as he strung a necklace of antelope teeth, when her cell rang. It had been a call from Hux’s other girlfriend, a woman whose existence Rey had been blissfully unaware of until that very moment. She’d hung up the phone, shaking. The thought flashed across her mind, to stalk over to Hux's apartment and confront him immediately, but as that moment passed, she’d settled for hurting herself instead – with a rusty razor she scraped across her ankle until the blood dulled the blade to the point of uselessness.

Leia had healed her with a scuppy, the smallest denomination of wishes, but Rey would have preferred she’d let the injury scar, as a reminder. _May she never again be this stupid about a man._

“Be sorry,” she says now, to her ex. “Just be sorry somewhere else far, far away from me.”

And she jerks free to walk away from Hux, up the faceted concrete staircase, and into the gathering sunshine of a bright morning.


	2. Chapter 2

On the ninth floor of a hotel room overlooking 14th and 4th, Kylo Ren pulls back a set of stained curtains to stare at a door set in a building some hundred feet below him. Sandwiched between an NYU dorm and a Dunkin Donuts, the door is darkly patterned and crowned with a sloping, circular window. Its brass doorknob is in the shape of a griffin, wings outstretched and fangs bared.

Behind the door, Kylo can just make out the edges of a dilapidated storefront window. 

STORE CLOSING: 70% OFF! EVERYTHING MUST GO, a faded banner screams at passerby. Pasted just above it is a FOR RENT sign, its block lettering still aggressively fresh. 

The sidewalk around it teems with people, swarms of bodies jostling past each other and fanning out into the edges of the street to sidestep tourists and slower pedestrians. No one seems interested in the dark door with the griffin knocker. And yet, over two hundred feet away and barricaded behind grimy glass, Kylo can feel the sting of dark magic emanating from it like something egregiously, physically wrong: a bitten tongue or badly stubbed toe. 

Subconsciously, his mouth arranges itself into the familiar position of a snarl.

“Would you stop agonizing over a fucking door, Ky? You’re making me antsy.” Behind him, Poe digs into a gyro with gusto. “There are plenty of other things to do in the Big Apple besides brood.”

Kylo turns a forbidding face his way, wordlessly demanding to know what kind of things. It’s a rhetorical expression meant to drive home a point, but his half brother rises to the occasion. As always, Poe can never resist the opportunity for humor.

“For starters, have you _seen_ the girls in this city? The majority I’ve seen have been exceptionally good looking. Isn’t this supposed to be like, the fashion capital of the world or something?”

“That’s Paris, you complete jackass,” a cool voice interjects from his right. 

Perched on the bed, with her wings furled around her like a great bird of prey, Finn – short for Finnola – appears monstrous. Kylo might be the leader of their band of three, but his half sister Finn has always been the most ferocious, as if with her sword and her protective anger she can somehow atone for the sin of being born female. With her dark hair scraped back into tight braids away from her face, her cheekbones appear vividly pronounced, like twin blades in her face. Her eyes are flat and shark-like, silhouetted in the glow of sunlight through the filthy window. 

“The human world fails to impress me. Besides, we don’t have time to fuck around. The sooner we get this over with, the sooner we can go back home – where we belong.”

Poe swallows a mouthful of tzatziki, unperturbed. “ _Fuck_ around! Get it?” He smirks, eyes ping ponging from Kylo’s face to Finn’s, finding each equally inscrutable. Slightly dampened by the lack of enthusiasm in the room, his body sags into the springs of the chair behind him. “Aw, you guys are no fun.”

“Finn is right,” Kylo adds curtly. “We have a job to do. Let’s get this over with.”

Kylo can’t remember the last time he was interested in a girl. He just remembers the _one_ , the memory of her death indelibly etched in his mind, seared there as if by a brand. As the blade fell in a blurring of silver, her eyes had sought out his. Even then, in that place of death and hatred, she’d fought to forge a final moment between them with her gaze. Even then, he’d clawed desperately for her, tried in vain to summon his magic through the exhausted fugue that torture had wrought on his body. Fuck knows, he’d _tried_. The capillaries of his eyes had burst with the effort, tingeing his vision red, so that everywhere he looked was crimson stained, as if with blood.

Not that it mattered, in the end, because there was her head, separated from her body, leaking blood and viscous fluid all over the scaffolding. And there he was (and still is): alive, despite his best efforts towards the contrary.

Kylo had been gone so long, his siblings thought he’d died.Years later, Poe got shit faced after sucking down something in the barracks that sent him into paroxysms of hallucinations. As Kylo sat with him, holding back his hair between intermittent bouts of vomiting, Poe confessed how he and Finn had actually held a funeral for Kylo. Poe dug an empty, shallow grave. Finn sunk her fingers into the earth and wept. 

Somewere in the retelling, Finn had stumbled upon both of them camped out in the barracks. Predictably, she’d lambasted Poe for his debauchery and insisted she’d never cried over Kylo. Her flawless face scrunched up in distaste at the mere thought of crying over her epically fucked up brothers. And even though Kylo knew his half sister to be cold and ruthless and _fierce_ – among the fiercest of the Misbegotten, the army of bastard angels sired by Emperor Palpatine – he felt nothing at the thought of her tears for him.

Because everything good Kylo was, and everything good he would have become, died the day a chimaera girl was executed in Loramendi.

Now, he exists at the point of a sword. Now, there is simply the yawning abyss of life and the black hole of vengeance, taunting him with its endlessness. Now, there is only the gray dawn of each new day and the promise that the next will be worse.

Turning back to his vigil at the window, Kylo’s attention is caught by a girl knocking gingerly on the accursed door nine stories below him across the street. She’s a brunette, her hair tied back in a series of complicated braids – but it’s a whimsical hairstyle, as opposed to Finn’s transparent attempt at asexuality – and even at this distance, he notices her lithe form and graceful mannerisms. 

“Finn,” he jerks his head at his sister. “You see that? The human girl?”

Finn snorts, disinterested. “Probably a trader coming to bring teeth to the Jedi Master.” She says the innocuous word _teeth_ like it is something black and dark, snapping her own rabidly in response. And teeth might be innocuous on their own, but in the hands of Jedi Master Luke, they turn into so much more. 

Kylo clears his throat. “She’s too young to be a trader.”

The human traders who come to deal with the Jedi Master are among the worst of humanity, and they wear the strain of hard living and bad choices almost like caricature villains. With her fresh face and straight backed grace, it seems almost impossible to place this girl in the same category – but then, Kylo knows better than anyone how monsters can wear beautiful faces. The beautiful physical body is often no indication of the black and rotting soul that lies beneath it. 

Finn examines her fingernails, filed into claws. She looks interested for the first time all afternoon. “If she’s in league with the Jedi Master, then she too, will die.”

“Nothing like the thought of a little bloodshed to do it for you, huh Finn?” Poe adds from his perch on the couch.

The two of them dissolve into petty banter, but Kylo remains sitting, his gaze lazered on the door, long after the strange girl is swallowed up by the depths of the building.

\-------

“Is that what you’re wearing? You’re going to be cold in London. It’s raining there at the moment,” Luke tells Rey, without preamble.

Rey ignores him, sinking into a high backed chair at the kitchen table and helping herself to one of Leia’s iced cookies. Leia typically bakes them in the shape of various chimaera, and today’s tupperware overflows with an artistic array of horned lions, humanoid wolves and great winged serpents. Absently, Rey bites the head off what appears to be a faun with bat-like wings. She’s never asked if there are more chimaera beyond Luke and Leia. It’s merely one of many on her list of taboo questions.

“I’m not going to London today,” she spits, her mouth full of dough, spraying crumbs across her silky, pale blue camisole top. “I was wondering if I could stay here tonight, like I did when I was little.”

When she’d been a girl, too young to be pushed out onto the streets of Earth by herself, Rey had cuddled up to Leia in the chimaera’s own bed. Her days had been filled with drawing, food and lessons in teeth denominations. Once, she’d played innocently with the tuft of Luke’s tail while she splayed on the carpet and cooed happily. She’d woken each morning at dawn, cocooned under Leia’s arm, to the noisy cacophony of the chimaera’s alarm. 

When she moved out at fifteen, that life in the store had ended abruptly, but today’s encounter with Hux has Rey nosing towards familiar comforts. She aches to be held, to be loved, to be told that everything will look better and brighter the next day.

“You’re going to London,” Luke informs her in a tone that brooks no argument. “And chew before you speak; I haven’t raised you to be a complete heathen.”

Only slightly abashed, Rey gives an almighty swallow. “Why London?”

“Because Unkar Plutt owes me teeth, and he was last seen at Portobello Market.”

Rey raises an eyebrow, surprised. She has standing appointments with Unkar twice a year, and the last time she’d seen him had only been the better part of three months again. She’s about to say so, when she hazards a glance around the shop and notes that the jars typically brimming with teeth are almost empty. She notices other things too: the hollows under Brimstone’s eyes are more pronounced, the skin of his face yellowed and sagging in the dim lighting. With his head bowed to look down at her, even his horns appear to droop.

She swallows down the refusal with the last of the cookie. For her chimaera father, she’ll do this. For Luke, she’ll do anything. “Alright. What do you need?”

\-------

When Rey leaves Luke’s shop, Leia lets her out through the same door by which she’d entered – but once she steps through, she is in London. Behind her eyes, an influx of nausea sparkles. Rey shakes her head to clear the residue of leftover magic, though the thrill is slower to fade.

Luke’s shop opens onto dozens of cities across the world, and she’s been to all of them. Last year, Rey spent a semester “abroad” in Morocco, where she learned the basics of snake charming and how to cook chicken bastilla. She’d spent other, less savory times there too, including the awful afternoon a man in the souk pressed up against her as she’d waited to buy a table runner embroidered with Moroccan mandalas in eye watering shades of amethysts, tangerines and golds. She’d stiffened, intending to back away slowly, but the man grabbed her wrist with a grip like iron. When he pulled, she twisted to face him, whip crack fast. She’d spent eight years in krav maga lessons; she could kick box passably well and throw a knife with pinpoint accuracy. Few ever realized that her gliding, straight backed grace went hand in hand with deadly skill – and now, it served her well.

She was too close for a kick, but managed to land a palm strike with her free hand that had him immediately dropping her wrist. Table runner forgotten, she’d hurtled back through the marketplace the way she came. For weeks afterward, she slept with a knife under her mattress.

Whenever Rey goes, and the door of the shop thuds shut behind her, the connection is immediately severed. Luke’s shop exists in another dimension, suspended between worlds, with the magic functioning in a strict one-way capacity. Vandals won’t ever be able to force their way in. Unless opened from within the shop itself, the door will only ever lead to nondescript places: storage spaces, deserted stores for rent, boarded up houses.

As she winds her way through the crowded Portobello Market, misty rain slanting sideways onto her shoulders, Rey muses about the similarity of that door and her own self. She too, feels one-sided, like everything in her life is only a cover up for something deeper, like she only knows half of her own story. But to ask questions is to risk pushing away the only family she’s ever known. In the past, her questions have elicited growls and forbidding faces.

Rey’s heart clenches in her ribcage. If she lost Luke and Leia, she’d truly be alone. She can’t fathom anything worse.

“Fruit ‘n’ veg! Get your lovely fresh berries!” The call of a vendor to her left startles Rey out of her reverie. Sandwiched between the brightly colored houses near Notting Hill, the market hums with energy. Punnets of raspberries, blueberries and blackberries lie next to juicy hunks of cantaloupe and watermelon, still water kissed and glistening. Woven baskets overflow with turnips, radishes and deep red bell peppers. Steam wafts from neighboring carts, the air hazy with drizzle and thick with the scent of sizzling meat. Rey ignores the answering call of her stomach (the cookies already feel like a long time ago), and wends her way deeper into the throng of the market, past the crystal jewelry, the gold embossed cases of books, the brightly patterned skirts, garish heels and tightly packed racks of spices and olive oils.

Unkar Plutt is where he always is, sequestered at the Crown Arcade, hidden behind Gallery 117 and Humble Pie. Rey pushes through a wall of tourists, her eyes slowly adjusting to the dim interior.

“You’re not due ‘til April,” Unkar says, by way of greeting. He’s wearing a Liverpool shirt and low slung, dark wash jeans held up by a tatty belt. Even in the darkness, Rey can see the green swelling of an old bruise by his jaw, visible under days old stubble. Luke told her once that Unkar’s a mean drunk. And if somebody takes a swing at him after a couple too many, that’s not really any of her business.

“Nice painting,” Rey responds, tilting her head to a garish Art Noveau rendering of a woman with sinuous hair, set in a gilt-edged frame. “Is it new?”

Unkar appraises her, stubbing his cigarette into the ashtray. He blows a cloud of smoke her way, his eyes dark and hooded. “I wasn’t expecting you. What’s going on, that the Jedi Master needs teeth so soon?”

Rey snorts a laugh. “Like he’d tell me. I’m just his hither and thither girl. If there's anything going on, I'm the last to know.” With her pinky, she flicks a bronze statue of a fertility goddess with breasts the size of eggplants, squatting low over a miniature cityscape. “So. Got any teeth? I’ll make it worth your while.”

Unkar’s eyes narrow, but he waddles away wordlessly, leaving Rey to stare at the store’s array of eclectic items. The desk to her left is piled high with brick-a-back and dusty backed clocks. She’s more interested in the artwork, a truly random assortment of Art Deco, Art Noveau, Historicism and Post Impressionism. She recognizes a copy of Thomas Cole’s _The Architect’s Dream_ , and her eyes slide past it to a tiny watercolor of the sky on fire. 

She picks it up, careful not to smudge the front. A sunset painting, it’s flooded with rich, bright colors – but it’s the way the artist has drawn the quality of the air to look blurred, as if beat with wings –

She turns it over. It’s titled _Angels at Sunset_. And while it’s a pretty painting, there’s no reason at all for her heart to swell with … almost memory? Somewhere in the recesses of her mind, she remembers a spread of black feathers and fireburnt eyes, but then it’s gone, just water trickling through her cupped palms.

“Nice painting, huh?” Unkar’s back and mirroring her earlier words with a sardonic smile. “But I didn’t take you for an art connoisseur.”

He opens his fist, tipping out a handful of teeth onto the antique coffee table. Rey clenches her fist, exhaling slowly. “I know value when I see it.”

Unkar only shrugs, watching as Rey sorts through the mess of molars and canines with a practiced hand. She looks up, scowling. “The fuck? These are mostly baby teeth! You know Luke doesn’t take those.”

But Unkar pauses, his gaze deepening. He takes her in slowly, eyes drifting up her camisole and dripping raincoat to her dark hair, lying coiled about her neck. When his gaze dips to her hands, her twin hamsa tattoos burn under his perusal.

Unkar says, “You don’t know everything, Rey. Once, Luke asked me for baby teeth. Just once.”

**Author's Note:**

> Title taken from one of Christopher Poindexter's poems
> 
> "I loved her, not for the way she danced with my angels, but for the way the sound of her name could silence my demons."


End file.
